The Gist: The Very Hungry Killerpillar
Seemingly to their own surprise, the Trump administration goes to war with Iran. This is the Gist.
Once upon a time, there was a country filled with religious extremists, willing to take violent action at home and abroad against anyone they declared their enemy.
This week, the United States military just followed orders as the President took the easy and fun decision to drop some bombs. By the end of the first week they killed one Ayatollah, 177 schoolgirls and teachers at a primary school, six Americans, sank 20 ships, killing hundreds more, supported Israel killing 123 people by bombing Lebanon, and killed over 1,300 Iranians, including all of their own perferred people to take over in the case of a regime change.
This weekend, they may have the start of a stomachache.
Carnival of Grotesques
This Trump administration has always been a cavalcade of the incompetent and the warped. Wherever possible, he tried to appoint people who met both those requirements so that they wouldn't have any independence of mind. He needed real losers so that they had nothing to fall back on beyond his patronage.
Which takes us to Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, a man who achieves the rare feat of being both eager to show off his hard muscles and yet somehow also personifying erectile dysfunction.
Everything objectionable about this failure of a person has been on show this week. His weird christian extremism (note, not actually Christian) saw his hand-purged officer class deliver simultaneous messages to their troops that "President Donald Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.”
Oh, goody.
Also on display has been the fact that he is thicker than mince. Faced with pretty basic questions like "Hey, do you know what the plan for this war is?" or "Have you got enough missiles for this?" and "Have you started an illegal war? Because you're meant to get Congress' approval for that sort of thing." he immediately spiralled.
Pete Hegseth is just saying things. What things? Well, he doesn't have to know. Why should you?
"Our Authorities are Maxed Out" may be the standout quote in this freestyle jazz of artless aggression, plumb dumbness and barbarism. I think this is what is meant by the phrase Crashing Out. This guy is one week into a lifetime of consequences and he is already underwater. Or, if not water, than certainly some liquids.
A dishonest President won't even stay bought
One of the more obvious bits of the many many corruptions simultaneously at play in the US administration has been the eagerness of the Trump family to accept money from Middle Eastern governments. Two billion from Saudi Arabia for Jared Kushner's venture capital firm. (The Son-in-Lawless)
Half a billion for the Trump family crypto business from the United Arab Emirates. (Insert eyeroll emoji here)
A big gold plane for the President himself from Qatar.
And more billions in 'membership fees' for the Trump (Chairman for life) Board of Peace from Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates.
And that doesn't include the numerous Trump-friendly financial deals inside the US economy that have been backed by petrodollar money, such as Twitter's purchase by Elon Musk and gulf-state backed AI and data centre investments.
Basically, the petrostates of the Middle East have been paying protection money for a quiet life and a say in US policy. But now there are unwanted Iranian drones and missiles falling out of the sky on them, killing locals, upsetting the influencers and angrying up their powerful Soulless Shopping Mall lobby.
This guy won't even stay bought reliably.
Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig
Nipping to Venezuela and kidnapping their president is one thing. Popping into the transport and oil engine of the global economic machine and jamming its works with dead schoolgirls and $100m missiles tends to be quite another. The sheer kinetic energy of the social and emotional forces released by that kind of intervention doesn't wind out in a day.
Instead, the colonial boomerang has whizzed back to the US at the speed of a fibre-optic cable carrying a market trade.
Let's take some quotes from The Hill, a newspaper specifically for Washington's political class. This is what the Imperial centre is reading about itself;
“The Fed is soon to meet to determine what to do with rates at a time when oil prices and gasoline prices are up and thus, inflation is probably on its way up,” wrote Eugenio Aleman, chief economist at Raymond James, in an analysis.
“This is probably the worst scenario for monetary policy, and we will probably hear the term ‘stagflation’ repeated once again
The Islamic Republic’s naval operation has choked off oil exports from the gulf, severely restricting international supply. A prolonged conflict would also force Persian Gulf nations to halt production as barrels pile up in warehouses, which could lead to longer-term price increases.
[Trump said] "if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit,”
The US voter appears, from the outside, to have a series of complicated and contradictory beliefs and wishes. But one of the few constants is that they really hate paying higher prices for things. Never mind whistling past the graveyard, this last comment, from the President for Cheaper Eggs reads more like marching a brass band past his own political resting place.
Diplomacy by other means
The problem for personalist authoritarian regimes is that the Supreme Leader surrounds himself with stooges and yes men who don't tell him when he's making a mistake. This problem is particularly acute when the Supreme Leader has gaping holes in his intelligence and knowledge base, but is too insecure to listen to anyone who knows more or has better judgement than him.
Through both of his terms, Trump has been mesmerised and delighted by the fascist notion of strength, as projected by military force. This machismo pose has similarly pleased his base, who love a good sabre-rattle as much as the next red-cap wearer.
His self-retitled Secretary for War has played to his Supreme Leader's love of War talk, hysterically screaming about how much war he's going to do.
Having excitedly gone along with an Iranian engagement that, per the Secretary of State's comments, seems to have been initiated by another country entirely, the administration is now slowly discovering that War is not an end in itself. Fighting, killing and dying is not actually the purpose of a military.
After the defeat of Napoleon’s continental ambitions, Prussian General Carl Von Clauzwitz wrote a book titled "On War". Published in 1832, it started from a simple premise. War, as distinct from just slaughter, was the 'continuation of policy by other means'.
This is an inversion of the fascist impulse to present military strength and ability to cause suffering as a purpose in itself.
The US military can, unquestionably, cause death. But the US political system seems further away than ever from knowing what it is killing for.
Into that gap, whole empires have fallen.
